Kathmandu, Dec. 8: Schools and colleges outside the Valley have started opening for classes after months’ closure, following the health safety guideline to the utmost.

However, the resumption of schools and colleges in the Valley is still uncertain, leading students, who have been paying rent for months to secure their stay, to start leaving the Valley.

Kathmandu Valley, having a dense population and highest new cases of COVID-19 daily, has a high risk of COVID-19 spread due to which the date for opening education institutions has been unknown here.

Education sector has been closed since mid-March when thousands of students returned to their home districts across the country. Thousands of students have been bound to pay their rents and hostel fees.

"I returned home some days before the government imposed nationwide lockdown as the education sector was already ordered to shut down. I have been paying my rent, which amounts to thousands, since then expecting my college would resume and there was no other work for me than college at the Valley," said Kunjan Rajbhandari, a Bachelors level student at KIST College living in Ghattekulo.

The students have their rooms filled with belongings obliging them to continue paying their part of the room. The hostels deducted the charges of foods and other services and only charged the amount for the room. Meanwhile, some landlords gave some discount but many didn’t.

"Getting a discount was far cry because the landlord´s livelihood too depended on the rents," said Rajbhandari, who recently came to Kathmandu to dispose his belongings so he doesn’t have to continue with paying the rents.

"My college is running online classes and the board exam of our prior semester was also conducted online. It is unsure if the college will resume physical classes anytime soon due to which I decided to leave the room for now. I have been paying a handsome amount every month even when I wasn’t living here," Rajbhandari told The Rising Nepal.

Like Rajbhandari there are others too who have started leaving the Valley as their education institutions still remain closed and are paying rents and fees monthly despite not staying has fed them up.

"The hostel provided a discount but the final sum was still large since I didn’t need to stay here for so many months. The only reason I continued paying my fees was because there was an uncertainty if our exams would be conducted physically or not. Even now there is uncertainty if the physical classes would resume or not but I decided to leave the hostel for now so that I at least don’t have to pay fees for no reason every month," said Roshan Shrestha, a BSc.IT final year student living at a hostel in Dhobidhara, with his hometown in Morang.

Shrestha packed up his belongings from the hostel on Sunday and has decided to return home and come back to Kathmandu only when physical classes resume as a compulsion or if there is a need to appear written examinations.

source: risingnepal, 8 december 2020